


A Dead Fish Gains the Power of Observation

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-13
Updated: 2013-03-13
Packaged: 2017-12-05 05:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today, Sean has had more espresso than the average university student who finds she doesn't have enough time before the end of the semester to convincingly fake her own death. But that's okay, because today, they're going to make an arrest. [AU.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dead Fish Gains the Power of Observation

**Author's Note:**

> Since I arrive fifteen minutes late to everything, I missed sign-ups for the TSN Rare Pair Fest, so this was _supposed_ to be for that, but isn't officially affiliated. Here, I guess, have a random AU featuring polyamorous criminals in love and the cops that chase them :D
> 
> **Warnings** : I made a special effort to make this a happy fic, but it still contains descriptions of criminal activity that hurts innocent bystanders. (Nobody dies, though! This is progress, for me!)
> 
> Title comes from [this piece](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=721Kcrx0ZCE) by the Books. Can be read here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/117432.html).

***

 

They're going to make an arrest today. The energy in the air is palpable, a buzz like the kind Sean remembers from elementary school, when snow started coming down in thick, wet flakes that stuck to everything and nobody in the classroom said the words _snow day_ but everyone was thinking it. It's that kind of energy; a lot of people are staring at the radio in Summers's hand, like if they're not looking right at it, they'll miss something.

It crackles. Static bursts out, obliterating the beginning of "-- clear. Begin ascent of back stairwell, ETA two minutes."

"Ten-four," Summers says. His shirt puckers where it meets his belt, stretched too far over his paunchy stomach, and it's a nice shade of lilac: the kind of shirt a wife buys. Behind him, Narendra cracks his knuckles against his palm.

The schematics of the apartment building are maximized on the big screen. The only blueprints they could find was a JPEG file with low resolution -- Sean can barely make out the numbers that mark the Zuckerberg apartment; 603, three doors down from the back stairwell, on the east side of the building with kitchen windows that face the rising sun. Besides the front door, there are two other methods of escape: the fire escape and the trash chute. Officers are getting into position at both of these exits, and there's nowhere else to go.

This is it. They'll have the Zuckerbergs in custody in --

"One minute," crackles the radio.

The seconds tick down, and in the space of one beat to the next, Sean abruptly realizes he doesn't want them to get caught at all.

He blinks, and then leans back in his chair, which tips back obligingly. He looks around, expecting to find everyone looking at him, like the force of his epiphany should have somehow made the ground shift two inches to the left. But no, no one has moved. Anne's watching Summers, phone to her ear and one finger plunged into the cradle, poised to make the call. Narendra pivots impatiently on his heel, jacket flapping as he puts his hands on his hips and glares determinedly at no fixed point. Only Erica looks back at him, and when she sees the look on his face, she lifts her eyebrows, like, _what's wrong with you?_

He shakes his head, with no idea how to articulate it, the fact that he is regretting something as it's happening. 

It's an entirely foreign sensation for him, a dark sinking inside his gut.

He looks back at the big screen. Apartment 603 is officially leased to a Conor Oberst; Sean, who went through a Bright Eyes stage in '98 just like everybody else and later contributed to their Wiki page because what else were you going to do when you were bankrupt and sitting in an unemployment office, had blinked and frowned at the listing until Summers came over and snapped his fingers in front of his face and drolled out, _What, Parker, is her period late? What's got you so distracted?_ and Sean said with no small amount of surprise, _I might have something._

He went and checked the cassette tapes out of Evidence and sped-wound through comically high-pitched conversations until he found what he was looking for.

_\-- and if anyone tries to tell you indie can't be defined and therefore has no beginning, fuck them. Indie music started with_ Letting Off the Happiness _in some basement in Omaha, and nothing's ever going to be that substantial. I was a clerk at Saddle Creek when they signed, you know._

And Erica's voice, startled and gleeful both: _You've met Bright Eyes?_

_Met? Please, Conor waited, like, five days before trying to stick his tongue down my throat._

_You're Conor Oberst's ex-girlfriend?_

Erica sounded impressed, doe-eyed, and even Sean would admit to being Conor Oberst's ex-girlfriend if it meant he got that kind of tone out of Erica. It's young, idealistic awe at its best: Sean hasn't met anyone who can fake that earnestness as well as her, not even people who stand on red carpets and get paid millions to spend five seconds doing it. He's never understood why the police don't hire her on full-time, but Erica says freelancing is best because she doesn't have to blow her cover to make an arrest: she can make the men do it.

Because she wasn't immune, either, Christy laughed in a burst, cracklingly loud in Sean's earbuds, and said -- 

_Oh, god, who isn't?_

And, standing there in the hallway outside Evidence with the cassette player in hands and his thoughts firing fast and loud as a pinball machine, Sean had realized, _Ding, ding, ding, I found you. I found you. I found you._

"Shit," he mutters out loud, spinning his chair around and pushing out of it with a feeling like he's got ants crawling up and down his legs.

Sound erupts out of the radio like a punch, and he freezes. Summers lifts it towards his mouth, eyes ticking back and forth like he's trying to read the situation from the sound alone. Sean hears yelling, banging, the crunch of hinges breaking and doors slamming dents into plaster walls, and swarming cops identifying themselves in an overlapping cacophony -- "Police! Police!" and "Clear!" -- until that fades.

Then, almost hesitantly --

"All clear, sir."

Slowly, Anne lowers the phone, and for a long moment, Summers does nothing. Then, in a very controlled way, he radios back, "What was that, Singer? Repeat."

"All clear, sir," Stuart says again. It's hard to tell through the static, but Sean's pretty sure he sounds nervous. He would too, in Stuart's position: Summers has a way of making you feel about two inches tall and whereas Sean has never met an authority figure he hasn't wanted to piss off, Stuart hasn't met an authority figure he doesn't want to instinctively please. "It's empty. If they were here, they're gone now. The whole place is stripped and wrecked." 

A stifled noise comes from Erica's desk. Sean sits down, fast.

"What about the computers?" Summers demands, undaunted. "Do we at least have those?"

Nothing. Then, Stuart comes back with, "They put the hard drives in the bath, sir. Al-Assad fished them out as soon as he saw, but --" he hesitates. "But there's at least three inches of some very syrupy drink in here. It smells like Red Bull, sir. They're … they're pretty ruined."

At that, Summers hisses furiously through his teeth, turning sharply and raking a hand across his skull in a bid to keep his temper. For a beat, nobody else dares to do anything, and then one of the Winklevoss twins voices what they're all thinking: "Somebody tipped them off." His face is very still. Sean could probably chisel a topographical replica of the California coast out of that jawline. "They knew we were coming." 

Without warning, he turns and drives his fist into the nearest filing cabinet with a bang like a gunshot.

" _Ty!"_ his brother gets out through gritted teeth, but it works to break the spell, and the office leaps into action.

Narendra materializes at Sean's elbow, glaring at the big screen and saying grimly, "They're running for it."

"Yeah," goes Sean, and takes a gulp from his mug so he doesn't do something stupid like grin.

"Detective," Summers snaps his fingers in their direction. "Get over there and see what you can get out of the apartment, find out where they're going. Take Albright with you," which is redundant, because she's already on her feet, satchel thrown crosswise across her chest and phone clutched like a small, paint-chipped grenade in her hand. Then he adds, "And Parker," like an afterthought, and Narendra, Erica, and Sean all stop what they're doing to stare at him, like he suggested that perhaps they ride a banana to the scene.

He's oblivious, standing over Anne and listening to the one-sided conversation she's having with the airport, which right now is a lot of verification of police code. He nods sharply, and then sees them still standing there.

"Yes, what?" he snaps, tetchy. "Do you need me to sign your permission slips? Go, or we'll lose them and these fuckers won't surface for another fifteen years!"

 

***

 

It's one thing to look at the schematics, it's another thing to step over the splintered remains of the front door lock and find himself in a railroad apartment, and realize that this is somebody's home.

There's a long hallway, rooms tacked onto either side like compartments on a train carriage; he supposes that's where the name came from. 

The air smells sour, like energy drinks and gone-off coffee, and the mirror at the end of the hall is startling: around it, low-maintenance succulent plants grow out of film canisters nailed to the wall in bright blooms of green.

It's funny, he thinks as he steps into the kitchen with its east-facing windows. He can recite three of the Zuckerbergs' credit cards numbers off the top of his head, list dates and locations of all their suspected felonies, as well as a majority of their misdemeanors, but none of that prepared him for the fact that Mark and Christy like hardwood floors, that there's an exposed nailhead right on the threshold of the bathroom that has to be _balls_ if you catch your foot on it stumbling in to piss in the morning. It didn't tell him that there'd be empty bottles with imported beer labels lined up in neat rows in a little green recycling bin in the corner of the kitchen, that there'd be Cinnamon Toast Crunch stacked with the Whole Foods brand of corn puffs on top of the fridge (Sean doesn't eat from Whole Foods, usually, but he likes the way all their brand cereals have jungle animals on them,) that there's a build-up of grime on the stove but no dirty dishes in the sink. There’s a pot on the back burner, filled with beans that are soaking: somebody obviously counted on coming back to make stew for dinner.

Sean's name hasn't been on its own lease in at least ten years, so he's something of a connoisseur when it comes to navigating other people's spaces, balancing that fine line between making himself at home and not disturbing another person's comfort zone. He walks in and out of rooms, taking everything in.

In the sunniest room, Narendra's standing with Stuart and Bob al-Assad and a few of the squints from Crime Lab, inspecting the soaked remains of the hard drives laid out in pieces in front of them.

"-- be submerged?" the detective is saying.

"It wouldn't take that long, sir," says Bob ruefully. "Red Bull baths and computer hardware just don't go well together."

" _Fuck."_ He turns around and sees Sean standing there, watching them. "What, Parker?" he snaps out.

"Jinkies, sir," Sean smirks at him, because his sense of self-preservation has been shot pretty much since he hit puberty, and the only thing he wants to do is take a stick and poke the angry policeman in the eye. "Just looking for clues. You wouldn't happen to see any big blue paw prints stuck to anything, would you?"

"I think that's mixing up your 90's children cartoons a little bit," Bob interjects, looking up from his evidence bags, and Stuart smacks his shoulder.

"Whatever," Narendra grunts. 

The room is largely dominated by the bank of computers against the wall, tucked out of direct sunlight; all of them look like they've been done in execution-style, their consoles tipped and ripped open, spreading guts of wires in every directions, keyboard tipped and dangling from the desk. Sean looks away from it the way you would roadkill.

It's crowded in here with all the squints, but he circulates anyway, taking in bits of the Zuckerbergs' life the way someone might absorb something new at an art opening: a menorah on the windowsill, either three months late or seven to eight months early; on the well-worn, secondhand-looking sofa, an Ayn Rand paperback rests opened spine-up over the arm -- Mark's, he assumes, although when he picks it up, the bookmark that falls is a take-out menu for a restaurant off Addams St., which Sean can't read because it's in Portuguese.

He flops down onto the sofa and, in the next beat, notices that they've make a makeshift end table for themselves out of a stack of CDs and -- never one to turn down the opportunity to judge other people's music tastes -- he immediately hangs himself off the arm of the sofa so he can read the titles. He sees Diplo, Prodigy, and three different Best Of: Metallica albums, a couple baile funk titles that bemuse him, and several They Might Be Giants that Sean thinks are probably courtesy of Mark and Christy's younger siblings, of which they have a combined total of seven. 

Most of the CDs are unmarked, clear plastic cases, though, and Sean feels a twinge of regret, because they've been here long enough to accumulate this many mix CDs and now they can't ever come back. There's something about abandoned mixtapes that's really depressing him right now.

"That's not an attractive view," Erica tells his upturned rear.

Sean straightens up. "Highlight of your day, don't lie to me," he says loftily.

"That's how they met, you know," she continues, and when he frowns at her, nods to the stack of music.

"I thought they met at the Bill Gates conference at Harvard in 2004."

"I'm sorry, which one of us has known Mark Zuckerberg since she was six years old?" Erica drops onto the sofa next to him, incurring the glares of at least two different Crime Scene techs, which, whatever, what do they think they're going to find: _we went to Russia_ written in invisible ink on the sofa cushion? Really, if Sean's holding out for any secret messages left behind in the apartment, he's hoping for a _suck it, Summers!_ in soap on the bathroom mirror. "Christy knew who he was long before they went to school together, because of that p2p music sharing program he did in high school."

Sean nods. "Piracy is romantic," he says with all of his Napster pride, and she rolls her eyes.

Excepting their marriage in June, which they did legally, Mark Zuckerberg's paper trail officially ends a few months after he dropped out of Harvard, when he received and activated credit card #3. His wife's footprint is a little wider; she graduated with a 3.9 GPA and worked steadily as a DJ right up until the week of the Winklevoss heist. She has two albums of her samples and mash-ups available for free download online, and she has an Etsy store where she sells vintage jewelry. Sean added her store to his Favorites, because he could.

The next room he goes snooping through is the bedroom. There's not much in it except the bed, and like most beds in the first apartments of newlyweds, it’s large, hedonistic, messy, and completely dominates the space.

A laptop sits abandoned at the foot, though of course when he goes and idly picks it up, he finds the hard drive ripped straight out. Still, he can't help but smile a bit: that was always his favorite thing about cybercrime, the fact that you didn't even need to put on clothes or leave your partner to do it. He tracks eyes from the bed to the window, which has no blinds or curtains and looks straight into the apartments of the neighboring tower. And yeah, that's a little unsurprising: they did strike him as the exhibitionist type. He makes a mental note to, if he gets the opportunity, go over there and ask the residents as many uncomfortable questions as he can get away with.

He finds the bedside table tucked ashamedly off to one side, and looks over it curiously (he's not hoping to find condoms, or sex toys, or handcuffs. Of course not. That would be unprofessional.) 

There's a photo frame, yanked apart and disassembled and dumped in its component parts, and Sean frowns, wondering why, if they opted to trash thousands of dollars worth of computer hardware in a hurry, would they stop for a picture?

As he sets the pieces back down, a flash of orange catches his attention, and -- 

Yes, that's a prescription pill bottle. Grab the picture, but forget the pills? 

He turns the label towards him and stares at it until the generic translates into the name he knows: Adderall. A beat later, it clicks: this is Christy's, though of course hers isn't the name printed on the bottle. She was diagnosed at seven and those things don't go away just because you change identities. He's impressed she pulled that off: the rampant abuse of Adderall by students looking to get an unfair advantage around exams meant there's a chronic shortage for the people who legitimately need it to function. 

He rummages further, finds the prescription folded in a larger sheet of paper. It's unfilled.

He frowns again, unfolding the other sheet, and finds himself scanning a list marked: _Category C: Considered Harmful._ Adderall is circled.

Slowly, he drifts out into the hall again, turning this information over in his head, and spots the reflection of a woman in the mirror, seemingly close enough to make him jump. It takes him a disoriented beat to reconcile the reflection with the reality and remember which way to look. 

She stands barefoot in the doorway to the apartment, frowning deeply, wearing a university sweatshirt with the neck cut out. A laundry basket sits tucked against her hip. 

He casts a quick look into the other rooms, but Narendra’s busy with the hard drives and Erica’s nowhere to be seen. Excellent. Sean’s day just got about twenty times better.

Grinning, he saunters over and greets her with a, “Hello, you are?”

She flicks her eyes up at him distractedly, then away, then back again, longer and unconsciously appreciative. Sean grins wider.

“I’m Amy, I live in the 600 apartment,” she makes an absent gesture down the hall with her free hand. “What’s going on? Are those _cops?”_

“Nice to meet you, Amy,” he responds, not an answer. He extends a hand for her to shake, which she does, eyebrows ticked up like she can smell the charm he’s exuding in her general direction and isn't impressed. “I’m Sean Parker, I’m here as a consultant.”

“Oh, yeah?" Her tone is politely dubious. "What do you _consult?”_

“Cybercrime, mostly,” he says cheerily. “I’m kind of the leading expert on a certain demographic of online scammers."

To her credit, Amy doesn’t need it spelled out. Her eyebrows climb further upwards.

“Mark and Christy?” she goes, her dubiousness edging right into scornful. "So, like, what, they pretend to be Nigerians and send out e-mails advertising a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme that you can get in on with a down payment of only $100?" her voice lilts up like an informercial.

"No, more like they developed a program that, when implemented on other people's computers, registers their keystrokes. They used it to steal online banking information and empty out people's accounts."

"Huh," Amy looks surprised. "All of that with a virus?"

"A virus doesn't need to be really sophisticated. It just has to infect as many people as possible."

"Sounds like a job for the FBI. Why aren't they involved?"

"They will be once we call them," he says casually, and smirks when she scoffs. “It's not polite to make other people do the job when you're capable of doing it yourselves."

"Yeah, great job." She's definitely being sarcastic now. "You're doing fantastic. Don't let me get in your way. Hey," she adds, before he can do something stupid like doodle little hearts on the bare skin at her collar or ask for her phone number. She hikes her basket further up on her hip. "If you're looking for people who might know where they've gone, you should ask Eduardo."

Sean blinks, thrown. "Who?"

"Eduardo."

"Never heard of him," Sean says blankly.

"I don't know his last name, but I think he's, like, their dealer or their boy-toy or something, I don't know. He's ridiculous. They think I don't know about him, but please, it's not like they're very subtle. I ride the elevator with the dude sometimes in the morning, and either he is permanently baked or he just died and found himself in heaven with 72 virgins. He is _fine,"_ Amy adds as an afterthought, musing.

_I don't like him,_ Sean thinks immediately, and that thought slots into place, and --

"Oh holy shit," he says out loud. “That bastard.”

Spinning on his heel, he leaves Amy standing baffled in the doorway to the apartment. Narendra's got Summers on the radio, and Sean comes in right on the tail end of, “-- our best bet is still probably the airport, sir."

"Ten-four. International?" Summers crackles back.

"That's likely --"

"No," Sean cuts in. "They won't risk flying."

The detective blinks at him, like Sean's the last corner he expected an interruption from. "What? Why not?"

"Because Christy's pregnant. If anything, Amtrak's their ticket out of here, you should get on that."

Narendra looks furious. "How long have you been sitting on _that_ information?"

Sean holds up his hands. "Woah, bro, I just figured it out, like, twenty seconds ago, there was a list of prohibited food and medication on her bedside table. It wasn't hard to put two and two together, even you could have done it. Listen, if you want to know who tipped them off that we were coming, I think I got our guy. It's the banker."

Diverted, Narendra blinks again. "Eduardo Saverin?" he goes, as bewildered as Sean had been a moment ago, and he feels a twinge of sympathy: Saverin isn't really the kind of dude that sticks in your mind. "But we took him into custody this morning."

"What?" says Sean, simultaneous with a stifled noise that turns out to be Erica, hovering in the background. "But then who --" he sticks his head out into the hallway, but Amy's gone.

There's a pause, and then Narendra breaks it, snapping his fingers to get Stuart and Bob's attention and gesturing at the mess. "See what you can get out of this," he says, missing the way KC, one of the squints, glares up at him, like, _no, sir, we were just going to sit here with our thumbs up our asses._ "Parker, Albright, with me."

 

***

**Some weeks previous:**

 

"Mark Zuckerberg?" Eduardo Saverin is all brisk efficiency, walks and talks at the same time, and the look he gives Sean is scrutinizing and dismissive in turns, like he's more concerned that Sean's going to ask him for money or if he wants to hear about Lord Jesus, Our Savior, than anything. "You're talking about the same Mark Zuckerberg that cheated me out of $19,000 of start-up capital and then when I sued him for it, got off on a technicality? Yeah, I remember him, what do you want to know?"

"Heard from him lately?" Sean asks mildly, sticking his hands in his pockets and following a step behind.

A scoff. "Please. I don't make a habit of keeping backstabbing bastards in my life."

_Says the competitive banker,_ Sean thinks, dry enough to sandpaper with, but he holds his tongue. See? He's getting better at this code of conduct thing.

It's a bright day, high noon, and the sun comes straight down in between the skyscrapers, catching on jewelry and sunglasses of the lunchtime pedestrians and winking off the cars as they flash by, and when Saverin casts a look back at Sean over his shoulder, he has to squint.

"Why? What does he owe you?"

Sean puts a bounce in his step. "Jail time," he says brightly, and Saverin halts in surprise.

"You're _kidding,"_ he sounds delighted. Sean would too, he supposes, if their roles were reversed: who doesn't enjoy watching the old high school bully flunk out of all their classes and wind up a cab driver with athlete's foot and a beer gut at thirty? It's a wonder Saverin isn't suffocating under the weight of schadenfreude he must be feeling right now.

"Yeah," he goes, suppressing a smirk. "I'm a cybercrime consultant for the police department, and Mr. Zuckerberg is suspected for bank fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and a number of misdemeanor crimes. We're confident we can convict him for the bank fraud, but if you have any information that might help us, it'd be appreciated."

He has Saverin's attention now; an open, curious look that widens his eyes and makes him look like a child. "Is that so?" he says, seemingly unconsciously, and then switches his briefcase to the other hand so he can check his watch; heavy, chrome, identical to the kind Sean used to wear. It’s still sitting in a deposit box somewhere, waiting for his next court date, maybe. If he hadn’t pawned it already.

“That’s a shame to hear,” Saverin’s saying. “I liked him a lot in college. What about, um --“ he inhales, eyes ticking around as he racks his brain. “What about his girlfriend? Christy Lee?”

“Christy Zuckerberg?” His eyebrows tick up, and Sean elaborates, “They married in June.”

“Did they really?”

“Mmhmm. Lovely ceremony, there were some sample photos from the album on the photographer’s website. They look happy,” he shrugs. “The couple that crimes together and all that, I guess.”

“They always did feed off each other,” Saverin says, a little contemptuously. “Especially when it came to ganging up on me. She’s a programmer, too, you know, but,” he shakes his head, stepping out of the way of a jogger going by. “I thought she had better taste than that. She, ah, never struck me as the marrying type, if you know what I mean.”

_Yeah,_ Sean thinks. _I can tell what you think of women pretty easily, bro._

Saverin’s wearing a sleek, trim button-up that’s a shade off violet, undone at the cuffs and open far enough at the collar that it shows a ring of perfunctory posy-marks just north of his clavicle -- not the kind of shirt a wife buys. He buys $5 cappuccinos from Starbucks and seems to genuinely enjoy them, which puts him in Sean’s ill graces. (He was once evicted from a perfectly lovely girl’s house because he brought home a Starbuck’s cup and apparently supporting the conglomerate destruction of the private enterprise just to drive down the price of coffee beans in the growers’ own nations was legitimate grounds for booting him to the curb, so he has a vendetta against people’s taste for sugary coffee drinks, because it’s easier to hate Starbucks than it is to hate Sharon. Please, Sharon’s amazing, and Sean’s not disposed towards hating people who let him have a guest room rent-free for a year.) He looks, in short, like the kind of guy who would chew up a girl’s self-esteem and act like the injured party when shit when down, drink with his friends and talk about how women are psychotic and crazy, am I right, guys?

“Right,” is what he settles for saying instead of any of that.

He fishes a business card out of his wallet, trusting a born-and-bred businessman like Saverin to do exactly what he does: accept it, take a moment to read the name, and nod before tucking it into his own wallet.

“If you happen to remember anything, Ed _waar_ do, you can call Detective Divya Narendra with the police department at this number. We’re looking for anything that can help us find these two before they ruin anybody else’s lives.”

“Wait, what --“ Saverin’s head jerks up, startled. “What do you mean?”

Sean raises an eyebrow at him. “How do you think scammers like them get rich, man? I mean, yeah, they can pull off some pretty big heists,” and the Winklevosses will probably never forgive them for it, and now they’ve got a bloodhound like Narendra on the scent, too. “But really, their easiest targets are little old grandmothers who’ve just made the switch to online banking and don’t know to check for a secure https:// on their web browsers. Just empty out some retirement funds, college savings for the kids … all to support,” he waves a hand, absently, like he was never a part of that lifestyle and doesn’t remember it with semi-hazy clarity. “Whatever sybarite things young newlywed criminals get up to.

“Anyway, I gotta go,” he adds, because Saverin’s looking a little like he’s been smacked in the face with a fish, like “criminal” has suddenly stopped meaning something harmless, someone who tries to hack into the FBI website or someone who pirates copyrighted materials but mostly just runs around being smarter than everyone else and looking attractive (okay, Sean's back to talking about himself here,) and started meaning something with consequences for other people, and this is a good juncture to leave him stewing on it. He starts to walk away, turning around long enough to remind him, “Be sure to give us a call, yeah?”

When he next looks back, under the pretense of looking both ways to cross the street, Saverin’s right where he left him, staring after him.

“Well?” Erica demands, offering him the pickle from the wrapping of her Jimmy John’s sandwich as he slides into the passenger seat. She drives a mint-colored station wagon, it’s all very private eye. “Does he know anything?”

Sean crunches on the pickle and thinks about it. “Nah,” he decides. “Eduardo Saverin? He’s never going to do a single exciting thing in his whole life. Trust me, twenty years from now, he’ll be accounting for Gary’s Tuxedos or Snookies Cookies. He won’t take a risk on someone like the Zuckerbergs, he doesn’t have the balls. Sorry,” he adds, when Erica grimaces. “Not a big fan of balls, I take it?”

“I don’t know what you mean, they are absolutely delightful when crushed,” she says sweetly, wadding up the wrapping and tossing it into the backseat. 

 

***

 

Back at the station, an aide meets them on their way up from the parking garage.

"How long has he been in custody?" Narendra demands of her, striding fast enough that she has to walk double-time to keep up, heels clicking hard against the linoleum and her mouth set into a firm line. Sean doesn't know her name. He considers this a tragedy.

"Since eight this morning, sir," she replies.

"So we can only hold him for another twelve before we've got to charge him or let him go," he concludes. "Shit."

"Contempt?" Erica supplies from the rear of their procession, her voice blithe. "Aiding and abetting? Hindering an investigation? There are a whole bunch of excuses you can use if you're desperate."

"Charging is different than holding someone on suspicion of, Ms. Albright. Even private dicks know that."

"Oh, my mistake." Erica's tone is lofty, and Sean darts a curious look at her over his shoulder, because he's known Erica for a lot longer than Divya Narendra has, and what she is radiating right now is borderline hostility. He likes her for not liking the cops, but even she's got limits when it comes to purposeful antagonism.

Erica heaves a sigh, pulling an apologetic face at him. He spreads his hands and lifts his eyebrows, meaning, _what's wrong?_

She just shakes her head and looks, for a moment, frightfully tired.

"I don't suppose," Narendra's saying to the aide, as they round the corner and come to an abrupt halt outside the door leading to the interrogation rooms. "The arresting office bothered to fill out the paperwork?" She produces a folder like magic, passing it over. He flips through it. "Excellent. Which room is he in?"

She points. "Four."

"Good." He juggles for a second, then passes her his radio. "Can you take that up to Director Larry Summers and tell him we've got an accomplice to the Zuckerberg case and to meet us down here, please?"

After she leaves, Narendra keys them through the door. Because nobody stops him and specifically tells him he isn't allowed, Sean follows. Room 4 is at the end of the hall; on the other side of the two-way mirror, a man in cuffs has folded a paper hat out of what looks to be the remains of one of the little cups from the water cooler. He settles it on top of his head and balances it there, looking supremely proud of himself when he accomplishes it.

Sean clears his throat.

Before he can come up with something polite to say, Narendra throws open the door and stalks into the room. 

" _Who are you?"_ he demands in a bark that hits like a punch, and the man jolts upright, paper hat tumbling off his head and skittering across the floor. The lights throw his face into sharp relief. His hair is brownish-red and sticks straight up the same way Saverin's does, and his eyes are large and expressive, but he's about three shades whiter, and has a more angular face.

Narendra decides to go ahead and state the obvious. "You are not Eduardo Saverin."

A look of profound relief crosses the man's face.

"Oh my god," he goes. "Is _that_ what this was about? Holy shit, you had me terrified out of my wits that I'd done something seriously wrong! You should have said something, freaking warn a guy or something!"

Leaning against the glass, Sean takes another, longer look. The suit's similar to Saverin's taste; fine, tailored almost to douchebag levels, and with the hair, from a distance … maybe they could be mistaken for one another.

Narendra seems to arrive at the same conclusion, because he thins his eyes dangerously and says in a very loud, very constrained kind of way, "Did you _deliberately_ misidentify yourself?"

"No!" the man yelps. "I had no idea you were looking for Wardo. You just arrested me!"

"Who are you?"

"My name's Dustin Moskovitz. I work with him. I'm in HR. We get lunch together sometimes and occasionally I fetch him a coffee when he's swamped. Guy's a lot less likely to bankrupt your financial empire if he's got Starbucks. But he's really nice, what do you want him for?"

Narendra sets the report down on the table and scrubs at his face frustratedly instead of replying, and just like that, it sinks in for Sean: they've lost them. 

Mark, Christy, Eduardo, all three of them are … gone, vanished. Water through their fingers. And they've lost their only lead.

They've got _nothing._

Sure, there's the possibility they might catch them stopping for milkshakes at Arby's on their way out of town with all their misappropriated millions, but what's the likelihood of that? Essentially, it's back to square one, and Sean can see that everybody knows it: apartment cleaned out, hard drives trashed, the banker gone, and Narendra looks like he swallowed a wriggling fish. He laces his fingers behind his head and faces the wall, taking a couple deep breaths. While he's turned away, Sean swears he sees Moskovitz _wink_ at Erica.

"Hey, Erica," he says a beat later, with a friendly nod in her direction. Narendra turns around again, scowling.

"Hey, Dustin," she returns warmly. "Nice suit."

"Thanks! It's new," he goes, in a way that sounds a lot like subtext.

Erica clears her throat. "How's Stephanie?"

He beams. "Great! She just finished laying some sample tracks, she's going to mix them into her usual playlist that she does at the Reptologique on Friday, see what the reception is. You coming?"

"I'll try. She owes me a drink."

"Or ten."

"Or ten," Erica acknowledges, rueful, in a way that makes Sean feel like he's missing the joke. Or, rather, missing the years of history that can exist between people. "Sorry about the mistaken arrest."

"Yo, I'm just glad my ass isn't going into the fire. I don't even illegally download music, man, I wouldn't dare, not when all my friends are DJs -- I've never done anything worth getting arrested for. Hey," he drums his palms against the tabletop. "Does this mean I can leave? I've been here for, like, _ever."_

Narendra responds with something sharp, but Sean isn't listening anymore. Carefully, he starts to edge away from the glass, one step and then two, and then sets off back the way they came. Nobody yells after him, and he pulls his phone from his pocket, thumbing it awake.

It takes him four tries to type out the text message, deleting and reshuffling while his heart pounds and around him, the police station hums like a hive of suspicious hornets.

Finally, he hits Send and exhales. There’s no coming back from that.

_don’t go amtrak!! they’re watching u. take greyhound bus north they changed northbound lines. new scheduled hasn’t synced with police system yet, no 1 will be looking 4 u there._

Okay.

Okay, now he needs to go.

Summers and the Winklevoss twins come out the elevator at the same time Sean rounds the front desk. Tyler doesn't notice him, looking too excited by the impending violence, but Cameron catches his eye before Sean can think to look away or pretend to be absorbed in the National Hotline notice on the bulletin board by the elevator doors. He nods, and Sean nods back as manfully as possible, sliding past to board with the other people heading up and hoping he looks like he knows what he's doing.

Two minutes, and he’s finished collecting his paperwork and his coffee mug from the makeshift desk they appropriated for him in the bullpen. He salutes Anne, but she isn’t paying attention.

He’s half-way down the hall, and then his phone buzzes with an incoming call.

Jamming the papers into his armpit with no finesse, he pulls it out of his pocket and doesn’t even need to check the ID before accepting it.

Immediately, his ear bursts with noise.

“-- the fuck, we don’t need him!” a voice is yelling angrily, and damned if that isn’t Eduardo Saverin.

_Son of a bitch,_ Sean thinks.

A woman’s voice -- Christy, it has to be, although he can’t make out the individual words -- says something in a placating murmur, and then there’s Mark’s “… Sean?”

“You should probably burn that phone,” Sean blurts out with abrupt realization. “Since it’s now on my incoming call records and they’ll probably pull that shit later, shit, I didn’t think of that.”

“It’s fine,” Mark responds, totally blasé about it, like there aren’t two very sporty, muscular underwear models who want his head on a spike gunning for him right now. They're probably discovering the not-Eduardo in the interrogation room as they're speaking. “I wanted to get the Galaxy 4 anyway, now here’s my excuse.”

“What’s he want?” That’s Eduardo again, belligerently loud.

“He’s being paranoid but helpful. I told you he’d come in handy. “

“I’m sorry, I don’t like him --“ the background noise obliterates the rest of that sentence, but Sean’s ego didn’t need to hear it anyway, and besides, he catches the good part: “He’s a _cop,_ he hasn’t come in anything.”

_That’s what she said,_ Sean thinks gleefully, and out loud, he interjects, “I'm a consultant, Ed _waar_ do, thank you! I took no oath to follow law and order, and hang on, are you still in the city?”

The answering silence is guilty.

“What part of ‘fly, you fools!’ don’t you get?” Sean gripes.

Christy pipes up, her voice overloud like she’s leaned in too close to the mouthpiece of Mark’s cell. “It’s my fault!" she cuts in cheerily. "I had to stop and pee.”

That makes Sean blink, and he says without thinking, “You’re not that far along, are you? I thought the ‘needing to pee every five seconds’ thing came a lot later.”

There's another silence, longer this time, and Sean realizes that the pregnancy probably isn't something he's supposed to know.

"Hi, Sean," Christy says, her voice gone very sharp. "I don't think we've met."

The aggression is coming through loud and clear. "Have I been put on speakerphone?" he wonders, and then immediately follows that up with, "I'm sorry, you left your Adderall behind in the apartment, along with a list of prohibited items that included most kinds of amphetamines and all forms of caffeine, because those make crack babies. I'm not stupid -- why else would you go cold turkey on your medications? Also, I kind of … blurted that discovery out in front of Divya, sorry about that. I really like your Etsy store, though."

Eduardo hisses. " _Shit,"_ he gets out fiercely. "Mark, hang up. Hang _up."_

"No," Mark says, flat. "I trust him."

"That's because you're --" Eduardo makes a wordless noise of frustration. "Seriously, am I the only one who's bothered to look this guy up? He's a paranoid recovering addict, he's -- oh, I don't know -- a grade-A _narc._ I'm sorry," that's directed at Sean. "Are we calling them 'consultants' these days? And by the way, he's not even very good at it, have you seen all the shit he's been convicted for?"

"He founded Napster when he was nineteen, he's allowed to be bad at crime."

"Thank you, Mark," Sean says loyally.

"We still don't need him! What does he bring to the table?"

"Don't you think you're getting a little away from the point?" Christy cuts in, mild, like stopping Eduardo mid-rant is something she does a lot. "Honey, we're not exactly smooth criminals, either. We're bank robbers of the twenty-first century. Hey, we're pioneers! Gone are the days of rappelling harnesses and daring heists out of sealed vaults! Although I do think I'd be a fantastic cat burglar -- seriously, leather, me? Yes, please -- they're a little old-fashioned these days. We're the new kind of Bonnie and Clyde, only with less of a body count."

"It's funny," Mark adds for Sean's benefit. "Because that's what she calls her breasts."

"Ah, these destroyers of livelihoods," Christy continues gamely, and Sean has a sudden mental image of her grabbing her own boobs and feels blood rush in every direction. "You may call them by their honorifics, gentlemen. 'Your Majesties' I think will do."

"It would be my honor," Sean starts, and then a thought occurs to him. "Oh, wait, I have a question. What was that photograph you took with you?"

"Photograph?" Eduardo echoes, but Mark says, "Oh, hold on a moment," and Sean grabs the edge of the nearest table and holds onto it pointedly, even though there's no one here to see him do it but himself. A moment later, his phone beeps and he pulls it away from his ear. There's an incoming message, and he opens it as soon as it loads: he sees Mark's fingers holding up the photograph, and around the edges of the frame, cement and the toe of somebody's sneaker. Then his attention shifts to the picture itself.

It's a wedding photo, but not any of the ones pulled from the photographer's website for the investigation. In fact, there hadn't been any evidence that Eduardo was even in attendance at the wedding, which is stupid, given what Sean knows now.

It's quality, he can tell, but not professional: no touch-up has been done, it's just raw, and Christy's the most visible feature, a bride in stunning white. She's in Mark's lap, gown spilling off his knees and trailing across the bottom of the frame, a spray of plumeria pinned into place behind her ear and hair curled back to accommodate. She's got a hand fisted in the front of Eduardo's tux, holding him in place while Mark shoves wedding cake into his mouth. It's a moment that's clearly just shifted out of being hilarious -- Christy's mouth is still caught on an open laugh -- and into something else, plainly visible in the way Mark's got Eduardo's face cradled in his hand, thumb just hooked over his teeth, in the way Eduardo's eyes are half-lidded, looking down at them both.

"Oh," Sean says faintly, in the beat after his phone dims with inactivity. And then, because he's never met a boundary he hasn't wanted to push, he goes, "So, hey, do you know which one of you's fathering the spawn?"

"None of your --" starts Eduardo, predictably, but with the ease of practice, Christy talks right over him, "Both of them. I specifically told my body that it better have twins, one for each of them, like that one movie --"

"Mine'll be the Arnold Schwarzenegger baby," Mark interjects. "Of course. Which means --"

"Eduardo's will be the Jewish one."

"Oh my god," says Eduardo indistinctly, with the air of someone who expects to be hit with a lightning bolt on the spot.

When he gets his breath back, Sean gulps back the rest of his laughter and says, "Wait, one more question. Out of curiosity's sake."

"Okay," says Mark.

"Why the Winklevosses? For your big heist? Out of everyone you could have chosen? Why gun for them?"

Weirdly, he thinks he might have struck a raw nerve, and this is the one they aren't going to show him. The silence stretches one long beat, then two, enough that Sean pulls his phone away from his ear to check to see if the call's still connected. He wishes he could see their faces.

Then Eduardo speaks up. "Me," he says, with something unidentifiable in his tone. "They did it to impress me. As a gift, because I've known the Winklevosses since Harvard. They were in Harvard's Investor's Club with me and I never liked them. But I do like money, and I spend my whole day dealing with the money of people who don't deserve it, so they went and they developed a program and they stole $600 million dollars. They picked the Winklevosses for me. Is that what you wanted to know, Sean? They did it because they love me."

"Isn't that why we do anything?" Christy murmurs, in a way that the speakerphone probably wasn't meant to pick up, and Sean closes his eyes, feeling both alienated and exceptional, a stranger in a foreign land and its only visitor at the same time, swamped under from proximity. He feels caught in quicksand, an inexorable shift in gravity.

Mark says his name, and says it again, and the third time, Sean inhales like a diver and says, "Yeah?"

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me," he answers without missing a beat. "I might have to call in a favor sooner rather than later. Got any tips on how to evade the law and vanish completely?"

"Have a friend who tells you to avoid the train station," Mark says simply.

Sean laughs, but it hurts coming out of him, fragile and glassine, and to bury it, he talks fast, "Okay, last question, I promise, I'm serious, last one. Why did Christy marry you? Please tell me it was for your dick."

"Oooo," Christy goes. "Let me tell you --"

"Good-bye, Sean." Mark sounds fond. "We'll see you soon."

 

***

**Some weeks previous** :

 

Sean isn’t a private investigator. He never went to police academy. He laughs in the face of the word “procedure” and if the story doesn’t involve a woman and, potentially, crime, then it isn’t worth telling. Subtlety is not his strong suit.

But when, four days after being hired on by Director Summers, he spots Mark Zuckerberg waiting for the number 9 at the bus stop on the corner of Leavenhigh with a young, curly-haired girl carrying a drawstring backpack, he chokes on his espresso (Starbucks brew. What? Even Sean falls off the bandwagon every now and then,) and, without thinking, fishes out his bus pass and boards with them.

He’s never taken the 9 before and has no idea where the route goes. He’s only in the neighborhood because he’s supposed to be tailing some guy: he knows a guy who knows a guy who sells knockoff purses out of the back of a truck, and _that_ guy might know who hijacked the official E! Online Twitter last week.

(All of the above is a lie. In fact, he was in the neighborhood getting his teeth cleaned, but the story always sounds more exciting if hackers are involved, right?)

(You read “hackers” wrong, didn’t you? It’s okay, Sean's not going to judge. His is a judgment-free zone.)

The wedding pictures used as samples on the photographer’s professional website haven’t been found yet, so at this point, the only thing Sean has to go on are Erica’s wire taps, Mark’s student ID picture from Harvard, a couple grainy security camera shots, and a "wanted on suspicion of" sheet long enough he could probably use it as a ceremonial hijab.

So he’s expecting the real life Mark to be gaunt, grey, with flytrap eyes and an expression evil and calculating enough to match his voice.

But for somebody who should, by all rights, be rolling naked in money with his equally clever wife, Mark Zuckerberg just looks … homey. Like somebody Sean might want to have a beer with. Someone he could take under his wing and tell him all the myriad ways the government tries to Big Brother its way into your private life. 

He looks, in short, like a taxpayer. It’s frightening.

He’s got his arm around the back of his sister’s seat while she scrolls through his iPod, and he keeps tugging out the earbud on that side until she twists around and drives her knuckles into his side with a, “God, you’re such a turd!”, to which Mark looks proud in the way of big brothers everywhere.

Sean expects them to get off together, so it surprises him when she gives him the iPod back and leaves out the back of the bus with a, “later, whack job!”

Next thing he knows, Mark’s standing right over him with his hands tucked into the kangaroo pouch of his hoodie, saying, “You’re Sean Parker.”

And this is why Sean should never be allowed to do undercover anything. 

(Heh. Well. “Under cover.”)

“Um?” he manages, intelligently.

“You founded Napster when you were my age.”

“I … did, I suppose,” he acknowledges in a faint voice, and then with more confidence, “Yeah, that’s me. Well spotted.”

“Sorry,” says Mark, in that preemptive way people do when they’re warning you that you’re not allowed to get mad at what they’re going to say. He’s got a clipped way of talking, like he expects to be interrupted and overridden as soon as he opens his mouth, and so has developed the most expedient manner of speech. “I’m just a fan who wants to say hi.”

“Well, hey.” Sean gestures, “Man, have a seat.”

Liking somebody really starts out that simple, and when two in the morning finds him on the curb outside the Reptologique, lying on his back in the storm drain and staring up at the few visible city stars with Mark Zuckerberg's phone number newly programmed into his phone, he thinks to himself, _Yeah, this isn't going in the report._

He never winds up filing that report, and instead, chalks up the information he shares with the investigation as obtained via “research.” He is the cybercrime consultant, after all.

The rest of it he keeps for himself: the way Mark’s shoulders lift a little bit when he’s talking about Christy, like the thought of her settles him into shape; the way he watched Sean while Sean was telling the Roy Raymond story the way some people must have listened to some scruffy dude tell parables in Jerusalem; the way he starts in about the Bill Gates conference he attended in 2004, which is as far as he gets into that story before he realizes that Sean does not possess the proper respect for Bill Gates as an icon. Sean met the man once in Seattle and tried to strike up a conversation, because Sean will make small talk with lampposts if they make eye contact, but Sean just didn’t possess whatever mannerism gelled for Gates’ autism. The conversation lasted a grant total of thirty seconds before he acknowledged defeat and backed off, because even Sean respects when he's not wanted. Sometimes. Whatever Mark saw in the guy, his social skills didn’t even seem to register. 

It'd been hard to reconcile that person with the one that stole from retired veterans for easy cash.

Sean had kind of wanted to fish for information about Christy -- _something_ he could bring home to Narendra and the others -- but he supposes, in the end, that he didn’t have to: Sean’s been around enough couples who don’t realize that everything they have done and everything they will ever do is for the other. He recognizes what he saw in Mark just fine.

“What about the wife?” Narendra demands, and one of the squints passes over the file.

Christy Zuckerberg, nee Lee, is the kind of woman who found out early on that, no really, she could do everything by herself, and honestly, men are just good for breeding and rehanging the cabinet doors. If she keeps one around, it’s an indulgence, a personal luxury, like paying for IMAX 3D once a month or buying name brand peanut butter.

“So,” Narendra slaps the file down. “To land a girl like that, Zuckerberg’s either got an enormous cock, or a shit ton of money.”

Sean looks over his shoulder at Erica. He lifts his eyebrows questioningly, but she shakes her head and holds up her fingers, generously allowing a small space between them, about the size of a cockroach. Okay, money then.

Narendra presses on, rounding on Sean, “What about the family? What’s your opinion on that?”

He thinks about the little girl with the hipster backpack who didn’t need her brother to escort her around town but let him come anyway, and this is the first time he lies to protect Mark Zuckerberg: “I don’t know if they’re worth following up on,” he says with a shrug. “I mean, these guys like their families in an abstract kind of way, but they won’t go to the mat for them. Visa versa.”

Narendra sighs, but moves on, asking one of the squints something about the day of the Winklevoss heist, and Sean lets out the breath he was holding, sinking back into his chair, slow.

Erica brings him fresh coffee, and it’s not until weeks later that he figures out what it was for.

 

***

 

He’s sitting on the lobby of Veronica’s apartment building, and all his worldly possessions are in the suitcase underneath his bench. He called a cab twenty minutes ago, and he feels exposed and vulnerable just sitting here waiting for it. He’s seen six people he knows and who know him coming and going, and he’s looking up the cast of the Jurassic Park trilogy on his IMDB app to see where they are now, just to keep his paranoia from ricocheting out of control.

Soft, teal suede boots enter his field of vision.

“Hey, Sean,” says Erica.

_Shit balls fuck fucking fucks on a pair of titties,_ he thinks, and thumbs the phone into sleep mode. _I am so fucked._

“Hey, Erica,” is what he says instead.

“I don’t remember you putting in for any vacation time,” she continues, hiking her eyebrows up and nudging the corner of his suitcase with her toe.

He scowls at her in mock offense, blustering, "Hey, I'm cool and happening! This isn't the time for me to be taking my chips down. I am Sean Parker, I go where the colors of the wind take me. Also," he elaborates quickly. "Veronica wants to remodel -- ha! Get it, it's funny, because she's a Victoria's Secret -- never mind, she wants me out because I get underfoot and she wants to be left alone to admire sweaty construction workers in peace, and I feel the wandering in my bones anyway. Besides, until they pop up on a grid somewhere, we're stalled on the Zuckerberg case, right? Sooner or later, somebody's going to notice how much money is involved and then the FBI will be all over it."

"Mmhmm," she drags out, pulling her iPod from her coat pocket and unravelling her headphones from around it. "Listen, I came here to give you a present."

"Naked pictures?" he says hopefully, and when she cuts him a sharp look, amends in a rush, "Sorry, sorry, tasteless joke, please don't put my name on the terrorist watch list."

"Good boy," she murmurs, and folds down onto the bench beside him, offering him an earbud. She smells like the brine they use on their pickles at Jimmy John's, and like the store-brand conditioner from Whole Foods, something ubiquitously pleasant and fruity.

He adjusts the earbud to make it fit, and when he's reasonably sure it's not going to pop out if he does something strenuous like breathe, he gives Erica a thumbs up. She holds down the Play button, and the earbud bursts with the sound of heavy, ambient static he's used to associating with interview tapes.

"What --" he starts, but Erica shushes him, and then Mark Zuckerberg starts talking.

"The first time? I was in love." He says it frankly, and there's something in his voice that's … different, somehow, from all the other tapes Erica got out of the wire she wore to all these encounters before the police officially took over the investigation. Sean can't put his finger on it.

The Erica-on-tape says, "With Eduardo?"

It's hard to tell, but she sounds a little surprised.

Mark starts talking very fast. "It took me awhile to even -- even -- _notice,_ because if you're not paying attention, then how are you supposed to know? If you're not _looking_ for it, then it's not going to -- you're not going to know, how are you supposed to _know?_ Being in love is something you have to _want_ to be, and that's just it -- you don't _see,_ otherwise, and it was the first time I'd ever been in love. I don't think I saw the template I was forming for myself, the way I was going to judge everybody I would love in the future by the way I loved this one man."

He stops for a breath, an inhale that's clearly audible. If he lifts up through his shoulders when he's talking about Christy, Sean wonders what he looks like when he's talking about Eduardo with that _force_ in his voice like helium coming out of a balloon.

"Everything I did … at least back then, everything I did, I did for Eduardo, either for his approval or for -- come on, you've met him, you know how he kind of leans into you like he wants to share a joke with you? But only you? Exclusively you? He has these smiles, and they're -- whatever. And now that's how I think of love. That way it's just a … an all-consuming _doing_ for another person."

"And then you met Christy?" Erica prompts.

"And then we met Christy," Mark agrees, and it might as well by, _And then we discovered the cure for cancer._

For awhile, there's nothing but ambience: the steady rasp of static off the microphone, a background rumble of laughter and indistinct conversation. This interview could have taken place anywhere, at any time: bus, cafeteria, bar. He has no way of knowing how long Erica's held onto it.

"I wish," says the Mark on tape. "I … I wish we'd gotten some kind of warning. Maybe I would have tried to clean up my life a little bit."

"How so?"

"Less drunk blogging," is the wry response. "A better attempt at good hygiene, girls like that, right? I might even have made an attempt to get rid of Eduardo, who are we kidding, she's the kind of girl you'd do anything for, but I never saw her coming. I never saw her coming," he repeats, soft, with something so shockingly helpless that Sean feels the intense urge to look away, even though it's a recording and there's nowhere to look. 

"Actually, hang on, you were there!"

"I was?"

"Yeah --"

"I highly doubt that, I think I would remember --"

"The bar, Erica, remember?"

"Oh. The one where you embarrassed me in front of all my friends?"

"… Actually, I'm pretty sure you did most of the embarrassing. It was less embarrassing insomuch as, like, emotional annihilation."

"Yeah, that was fun. You showed up and you interrupted me and demanded that I talk to you alone and you looked … well, frankly, you looked like you'd just had sex in the bathroom, and back then, that was enough. I didn't want to have anything to do with you and you weren't respecting that."

A pause.

"Back then?"

"Back then." Next to him, Erica has gone stiff. Sean wonders if maybe she'd forgotten that this exchange was on this tape, and never intended anyone else to hear it. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and squeezes reassuringly. Sean lives in a judgment-free zone. There is no judging in a judgment-free zone.

"It was all of us," the Mark on tape continues abruptly. "That first time, and yes, in that bathroom, don't look at me like that, if Christy walked in here and grabbed you by the ears, you'd do anything she asked, trust me --"

"Not today, thanks," Erica answers dryly. "I'm on my period. Even Christy can't make menstruation sexy. _Don't --"_ she yelps to whatever Mark does in response to that, and the earbud crackles loudly with a sudden burst of laughter, hard enough to make Sean's ears ring. " _Stop!_ You were talking about your hot threesome sex, go back to that!"

"Well --" some of Mark's reply is lost to static, but it comes back in with, "-- once is because opportunity arises, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern, and by that point, I knew. I _knew._ Without Christy, Eduardo and I never would have … well, like I said, if you're not looking for it, then how are you supposed to know. Christy was the start of so many things that even in hindsight are …" He measures out his words carefully. "She made everything that's going good for me possible. There."

Curiously, Erica asks, "Why did you propose?"

"Practicality," Mark responds. "Eduardo needs unquestionable connections for his job -- good VCs, reputable personal relationships -- and we decided early on in his career that his name was never going to get linked with ours. He gave us start-up capital and Christy and I created a _dozen_ different programs, Erica, it was so amazing to be surrounded by that kind of energy, but -- marrying one of us was off the table for him."

It's hard to tell over the tape, but it sounds like Mark's smiling.

"Don't tell, but … one of the first things Christy and I bought after our first heist were passports. Different names, dates and places of birth, obviously, but _his_ last name. If we ever fucked up and we had to vanish and go somewhere he couldn't immediately follow, and he had to hunt us down later, after enough time had passed so as not to be suspicious, that's how we wanted him to find us. His. His husband. His wife." 

There's a thud in the background that overwhelms the mic briefly, and Mark adds, apropos of nothing, "My heart is pounding."

"Honesty is scary," Erica replies.

"Yeah, but you're Erica. Honesty is the least I can do. You were my conscience when we were kids. I'm sorry we stopped being friends."

Whatever comes after that, Sean has no idea, because the recording clicks to its end right after that, and Erica -- real-time Erica -- hits pause and sits up. Sean removes the earbud, passing it back to her, and for a long moment, neither of them say anything. Erica rolls the cord of her headphones around her iPod, tucking it back into her coat pocket, and Sean digests the magnitude of what he just heard.

"You cut this from the evidence tapes," he concludes.

"Yes," she says quietly.

"You …" Sean can't find the words for it. "You could get in serious trouble."

"I didn't want the Winklevosses to have it," bursts out of her, like she'd been waiting this whole time to say it. "I didn't want them to have the satisfaction of knowing what isn't _theirs_ to know. I've known Mark since the first grade -- I watched him get into Harvard and _warp_ into somebody I didn't recognize and didn't want to know. Eduardo and Christy … they put something in him that made him _better._ The three of them click together in a way they just _couldn't_ in component parts. I was protecting that. I don't want them to just become another statistic for Summers and the department."

"All this time?" he says. "You kept it a secret?"

"Funnily enough, when Winklevosses come along promising hefty donations contingent on the arrest of some annoying Internet scammers, and there's this private investigator in town who just _happens_ to have files of information on these people, the police tend to approbate that information -- and the investigator! -- without bothering to fact check."

"Goddamn," goes Sean, impressed.

She chuckles. "They turned up on Monday for a race that was run on Sunday, is all."

"What?"

"It's something the twins say, never mind."

"Ah. Did Mark know you were recording? I mean, does he know this tape exists?"

She nods. "Probably, yes."

"That's … trusting."

She turns her head, mouth curved in one corner. "You'd be surprised, Sean, at just how much trust Mark Zuckerberg can put in a person." They're quiet for a beat, and then she laughs as some thought occurs to her. "It's funny, because it makes you want to do stupid things for him," she demonstrates by pulling the iPod from her pocket again, and then thunking Sean's suitcase with her heel, and Sean laughs with her.

"I couldn't help but notice," he points out. "That Eduardo changed his mind. About not associating himself with them."

"It takes a lot of bravery to give up everything for who you love, especially if you worked hard for it. It probably takes a lot of stupidity, too. Eduardo was just a little slower on the uptake, I guess."

"He's not going to have a career after this. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd handle that very well."

"$600 million probably helps."

"True," Sean allows with a wry chuckle. Then, "Does it bother you? That Mark and Christy stole that much money?"

"From the Winklevosses? Not really," and they snort, because there's a big white male entitlement complex if they ever saw one. "But the others? In the beginning? The roundly average people who weren't prepared to lose a chunk of their savings? Of course it bothers me. It bothers me a lot." 

She pulls a strand of hair over her shoulder, twisting a miniature braid of out of its end as she thinks. "But honestly? There are so many kinds of thieves. Even Eduardo's a thief in his own right. He works for a big banking corporation whose only interest is in its profit margins. We'd be here for two weeks while I try to explain to you exactly what these people are doing to fuck over our economy via perfectly legal avenues. Which doesn't justify anything, of course," she adds, catching Sean's expression. "Stealing money is a douchebag thing to do in any context, I'm just saying that for every scammer like them, there's an economist who's ripping off four times as many college funds to line their own pockets. We just don't _see_ them because they aren't painted as criminals."

"Thank you, Erica. I am sufficiently depressed."

Her smile is sad and rueful. "I really hope they get a fresh start. Mark and Christy and Eduardo, I mean. Use these new identities to go legal."

"Because they have a baby on the way?" Sean supplies, and Erica wrinkles her nose.

"Oh, god, you're right, I forgot they were reproducing. Yeah, I heard the criminal life is not generally recommended for raising offspring. Tends to have negative effects and all that." And then, suddenly, her shoulders snap straight and she looks at him, decided. "That's it. I have a job for you."

"A what?"

"I'm assigning you a job. Officially. Right now."

Sean's baffled. "Oh?" He shifts his weight a little on the bench. "I was kind of hoping you'd complacently look the other direction while I left town."

She rolls her eyes. "Exactly. I need you to show them what's next. They already pulled off the million dollar heist off the Winklevosses, petty crime is going to seem paltry in comparison. I don't want them doing more crime, so I need you --" she pokes his chest with a fingertip. "To sweep in there and dazzle them. I need you to get them to create something new. Something spectacular. I know they can do it, they just need the push. That's you. Show them what's hip, what's," she mimics his tone, "what's _cool_ and _happening._ Make them want it. Can you do that, Sean?"

"Cool and happening is my specialty," he says solemnly. His heart is thrumming hummingbird-fast underneath his ribs. Although, "hey, if it goes south, can I come crash on your couch?"

"No," she deadpans.

He lets his chuckles well up out of him and she smiles back, and it turns into a really peaceful moment: Sean doesn't get these kind of moments too often.

"Erica," he starts, and isn't sure how to finish. "Thank you --" _for trusting me,_ he thinks. _Thank you for not turning me in when you found I was going to run. Thank you for loving them and protecting them, even when they don't necessarily deserve it._

"Don't strain yourself, Sean," she interrupts, patting his chest kindly. Her eyes are crinkled in the corners.

Outside the doors, a yellow cab honks.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
